Stone, frog-sung, backyard pond stays still
But for sputtering birds,
Mesozoic dragonflies.
Twin boys with dinosaurs play under stars
like Van Gogh’s own—To them,
“deciding” coins, or Matchbox wheels.
And once again you’ll go to sleep beside me.
Our boys with plastic superheroes play under the moon
And my days still wake with you at fingertips’ ends.
Amid the stacks of drawings, giant books and now
My own words of mess on the floor.
Trying to craft a valentine out of old valentines.
Who I’ve lost, who I refuse to lose.
Keeping the boys’ drawings in a swelling box
To be revisited someday;
Max and Harry screech their monsters
across the kitchen floor,
Climb them up the lamps and over tabletops.
Today I hold you standing in the middle of a world
Of “the’s” they do not see yet;
The Greedy The Terrified The Terrorists or
The Hungry, panning for grains of gold in Zimbabwe
to trade for edible grain—love or survival?
Something wants to fly back to everyone I’ve lost,
for whom I never had a voice for loss and bring them this:
You press your forehead to my shoulder.
We hold on, and still.
Our boys keep spinning out their stories
Wild around us and at least once more
We’re given fifteen seconds of clumsy, temporary luck.